Where I Stand on Economic Collapse These Days

Well, damn, here it is nearly two full years since my unfortunate enforced break from blogging and the economic collapse that had been one of my favorite subjects hasn't happened yet--nor does it appear to be at all imminent. In fairness to me, back during the epic debates about slow versus fast crash circa 2008-2009 in online Peak Oil forums, particularly the old Life After the Oil Crash forum, I was firmly in the camp with the slow crashers, stating at the time that I thought America (and by extension the modern Western world) would limp along until some time in the middle to late 2020s before the bottom really fell out. I still see no reason to alter that prediction, though I will admit that the oil industry has been far more successful in exploiting so-called "tight" oil fields like Bakken than I ever expected. Thanks largely to oil shale exploitation and fracking, America is right now experiencing an oil "boom" that has the cornucopians confidently predicting that we will soon surpass Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world's top oil producer.

Other Peak Oil writers such as John Michael Greer have done a terrific job of explaining why the fracking industry is just another massive economic bubble waiting to pop and kick the economy in the balls once again. I won't rehash all of their excellent work, other than to point out that if fracking was really going to "save" a highly hydrocarbon dependent economy built on the premise of cheap oil forever, how come gasoline has been priced at well over $3.00 a gallon for several years now?

I mentioned in yesterday's post that the first minute cracks are beginning to appear in the foundation of America's body politic that are indicators of a coming political disintegration such as James Howard Kunstler first suggested in The Long Emergency. And if one casts their gaze overseas, one can see even more evidence that political disintegration is becoming even more of a word wide issue as more and more nation-states, many with artificial borders created by the Western imperial powers in the previous century, are beginning to break down or otherwise fail.

Somalia turned out to leading indicator by collapsing into total anarchy back in the early 1990s. Congo followed suit a few years later with a multisided, internal war starting after it's despicable dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, fell in 1997 that was so deadly it claimed the lives of millions and has even been referred to as the Great War for Africa. Moving forward, South Sudan finally separated itself from the fanatical Islamic freaks running the show up in Khartoum, only to almost immediately disintegrate into its own nasty little civil war. Ukraine is in flames as ethnic Russian separatists battle that country's puppet NATO government for the right to succeed, and now ISIS has risen up from the wastelands of Syria and Iraq to erase the border between those two countries as it battles for control of both of them. Heck, even Scotland is about to take a vote as to whether to become independent from the UK and as of this writing the outcome is expected to be very close one way or the other.

What every one of these conflicts have in common is that each are fueled by the desire of a whole lot of people to not want to be governed by anyone who is not of the same ethnicity, tribe or religion (or even a different sect within the same religion) as they are. Can't we all just "get along?" that great philosopher and poet, Rodney King, once supposedly asked. Sorry, Rodney, but the answer would appear to be, "fuck no."

For me the most interesting recent development here at home was that public opinion poll a couple of months ago which showed that Americans were at their most politically divided since just before the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression for you Southern patriots/separatists out there). Which I know is true, but I nevertheless have to shake my head in amazement at just how successful the power elite's divide-and-conquer strategy has been in this country since Reagan first got elected 34 years ago.

It's quite brilliant, really. For a generation-and-a-half, wages and quality of life in this country have been under relentless assault by a tiny group of billionaires and Wall Street tycoons who use their fortunes and control of the vast media empires to manipulate the election of a combination of rabid Republicans and compliant corporatist Democrats. This unholy cabal has done a brilliant job of manipulating everyone not in their own tax bracket into getting all foaming at the mouth about issues such as gay marriage, the pledge of allegiance, flag burning, abortion, contraception, etc., that they personally couldn't give a flying fuck about just so long as there is no political interference in their efforts to offshore jobs, slash wages, cut benefits and pauperize virtually every American worker but for a small cadre they need to carry out their bidding. Every once in awhile I get the perverse desire to stand up and slowly applaud at the sheer successful audacity of it all.

But it won't last forever. Sooner or later the scum that has risen to take total control of America will begin to lose their grip, mostly because they are so damn greedy that they don't seem to realize that a smarter strategy that would allow the party to last a bit longer would be to temper the looting of the economy ever so slightly and throw a few more crumbs to the lumpen proletariat. Thanks to their mass media lapdogs the idiots are compliantly eating the scraps out of their hands, but what happens when all the idiots have their flat screen teevees repossessed?

Given the above, I'm starting to believe that America may pull itself apart politically even before oil production plummets, although all the NSA spying and militarization of local police departments prove that the elites are going to do everything they can short of sharing the wealth to prevent it from happening. Thus am I standing by my prediction of the mid-to-late 2020s as a likely dates for collapse to really be underway, which would put it happening just after the end of Hillary's second term.

And if I'm wrong and the cancer hasn't yet come back and killed me, you can feel free to drop by here and mock me all you want.


Bonus: "It's shite being Scottish."

It is What it IS

Okay, I have REALLY had it with all these ragged looking, religious extremist back country hicks demanding that everyone who refuses to conform and worship God EXACTLY the same way they do be exterminated like cockroaches. These people are CLEARLY a threat to our American way of life, and President Hopey-Changey needs to stop being such a spineless, spluttering little pansy-boy and sic our ginormous military on them post-haste.

Oh, wait a minute, did you think I was referring to ISIS (or ISIL or IS or Whatever-the-fuck-it-IS?)? No silly, I was talking about Phil Robertson and his merry band of drooling, ZZ Top-wannabe troglodytes.

It's at about this point in the program that the Internet's vast legion of armchair warriors gets itself worked up into a rabid froth and begins firing off bile laden comments about how it is the Mooslim fundamentalist whack jobs from ISIS who are running around lopping off heads of anyone they deem an infidel and posting videos of the executions on You Tube for your entertainment. All poor ol' Phil was doing in that Hannity interview, they would argue, was exercising his God-given First Amendment right of freedom of expression.

Fair point. Okay, for the moment I'll take back my facetious call for military action against the Duck Dynasty. After all, there is a BIG difference between committing hideous acts of violence and merely spouting virulently violent rhetoric on national teevee, right?

Well, maybe not that much.

Let's examine for just a moment who Phil Robertson is. Beyond being a self-professed fundamentalist Christian, Robertson has a net worth of around $15 million that is the result of both his hunting apparel business and his reality television show. In other words, he is despite his apparent fanaticism one of the LEAST likely guys in the world to go out beheading reporters and risking having a predator drone dropped on his rich-ass head.

On the other side of this equation are the mostly anonymous ISIS fighters, who these past few months have been rolling up Iraqi and Syrian controlled enclaves even faster than they have the heads of kidnapped American reporters. But think for just a moment about who the ISIS guys actually are: mostly dirt poor young Sunni males who until recently were living under the oppressive Assad and Maliki regimes and whose life choices came down to either whiling away their days tending goats under a blistering hot desert sun for a few dinars a day, or joining up with the local militia boys and being handed AK-47s to go tear-assing around the countryside blowing away soldiers of those very same regimes that had had their boot heels so firmly placed upon their collective necks.

So which choice do YOU think they were gonna make? If you said "goat herder," you fail and clearly need to be sent back to retake Basic Fundamentals of Human Nature 101 all over again. It's a well worn cliche to say that when people got nothing, they got nothing to lose, and few people on this here old Earth have less to lose right now than your average Muslim living in those unfortunate Middle East and South Asian states that have been ripped apart by more than a decade of unbridled American and NATO militarism--to say nothing of a century's worth of exploitative Western imperialism.

But hey, let's flip this narrative over for a minute and imagine that it was Phil Robertson and his clan who had had the misfortune of being born Sunni down in old Mosul. And let's take it a step further and imagine that it was instead a handful of ISIS fighters who had been lucky enough to be born Christian on the Bayou, where the humidity may be high but one at LEAST generally has recourse to the rule of law, especially if one has managed to build a small fortune and can afford to sue rather than shoot their enemies. NOW who do you suppose is going to be rolling heads through the desert sands like zombie bowling balls versus who'll be raking in millions from their duck calls, parading around like circus freaks on their stupid reality teevee show and for some reason being asked to go on a national "news" network so some idiotic airhead can ask them to opine about world events?

It is about at this point in the essay that I imagine at least a few of you are thinking, "hey, Bill, who really gives a flying FUCK what Phil Robertson has to say?" Well, if these were "normal" times in America I'd agree 100%. But as I've pointed out so often on this blog, these interesting times of ours are anything but normal. America has for years now been skating along the edge of the economic precipice just waiting for SOMETHING to shove the country over into the abyss of at least partial economic collapse. And when the day finally does come in which either that happens, or enough Americans see their livelihoods ripped away from them that the country reaches political critical mass, what do you suppose the millions of heavily armed Americans who heard what Brother Phil said and thought "you're God damned right!" are gonna do?

America as a political entity is already beginning to splinter, just as James Howard Kunstler predicted it would in The Long Emergency, as evidenced from such events as the Ferguson riots and the various secession movements around the country advocating separation from certain states or even the U.S. itself. When it starts to actually break apart things are going to get ugly in a hurry for minorities, gays and even women, and many Americans are going to wake up and suddenly find themselves living in a dystopian world little better than the one those unfortunate civilians in the ISIS occupied territories are currently residing in.

I deplore Phil Robertson's comments for their obvious blind bigotry, hatred and sheer fucking ignorance. But what's worse is the fact that his hate filled words were not universally condemned from the moment he closed his mouth after uttering them. Sadly, what they represent is yet another weather vane pointing to which way the wind is currently blowing in our very broken body politic.

Ironically, by funding the Syrian rebels against Assad our government stupidly created the conditions that has allowed ISIS to flourish, while at the same time its domestic policies of continually rewarding banksters and Wall Street while fucking the middle and working classes is slowly creating the conditions that may well someday allow intolerant, violent, ISIS-like extremist groups to flourish right here in the homeland.


Bonus: My papa said "son, don't let the man getcha...do what He done to me."

Fight Your Own Damn Wars

The picture above that appeared on Tuesday on the blog Rebel Pundit of a bunch of alleged Syrian protesters chiding President Hopey-Changey's supposed lack of belligerence and praising George Bush the Lesser is a neoconservative's wet dream. The reason I say "alleged" is because of the English used on a banner being displayed in an Arabic speaking country, and the political sentiment is a bit too obviously partisan to be a genuinely spontaneous display.

As much as I deplore what Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's thugs have been doing to his own people, it is an internal Syrian problem. If the Iraq War proved anything at all, it is that invading and occupying a foreign country in order to depose a despicable dictator can actually cause more death and destruction than if things were allowed to sort themselves out. Beyond that, America is already teetering on the edge of the economic abyss thanks to 10 years of disastrous neoconservative policies. We simply cannot afford to be the world's policeman anymore.

So my message to the men holding the banner, whose motives I find to be highly suspect, is short and succinct: go fight your own damn wars and leave America out of it.